CHAPTER
10

The Path to Liberation

In This Chapter

The very first Buddhist teachings are foundational to almost all forms of Buddhism and subsequent teachings. They amount to what, according to the story, Siddhartha Gautama realized 2,500 years ago when he awakened to reality. He had been on a spiritual quest to discover what people can do about suffering. Were they merely subject to changing conditions, blessed with happiness in times of fortune, but doomed to suffer in times of misfortune or when inevitably faced with disease, old age, and death?

What the Buddha realized was in what way human beings contribute to their own suffering, and what they can do about it. Buddhism is sometimes criticized for being pessimistic because it begins with the discussion of things like pain and dissatisfaction, but Buddhism is actually quite optimistic. For one thing, the Buddha did not say all of life is suffering, just that no one seemed to be able to avoid it entirely. For another thing, the Buddha saw, and subsequently taught, a way for people to alleviate the worst of their suffering.

How to Use Zen Teachings

Before launching into a discussion of essential Zen and Buddhist teachings, it might be helpful to say something about how to relate to and use them. Given Zen’s emphasis on discovering your own truth and direct experience, it may seem strange to encounter so many statements telling you how things really are. Teachings are very important, but they are not meant to be believed or accepted. They are meant to be studied and tested, somewhat like hypotheses.

Even more accurate might be the analogy of learning a martial art, because Zen is not about learning something with your mind, it’s about embodying something in your life. Your martial arts instructor may drill into you the philosophy of his martial arts school and explain how to move in order to be successful in the art, but you still have to learn how to enact and know it yourself. In Zen, you don’t have to start from scratch in learning about reality, but until you personally experience how a teaching works, it hasn’t actually been very helpful to you.

Another important aspect of relating to Zen and Buddhist teachings is this: teachings are like medicine. Each one has been formulated to address a particular misunderstanding, harmful behavior, or habit. Some concepts and imagery are going to be useful to you while others are not, and some will be useful at certain times but not at others. For example, if you are depressed, the teaching that all things are empty of inherent self-nature may be difficult to explore without feeding your depression, while a practice like chanting or mindful activity might help.

Someone who has a habit of lashing out at others can benefit from special attention to the precept of not indulging anger, while someone coming out of an abusive relationship may need to work on compassion for themselves, even if that means indulging anger for a while. A Zen teacher can be useful in helping you identify the aspects of Zen with which it will be most fruitful for you to engage, given your personality, history, and circumstances.

The Four Noble Truths

The first teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha consisted of the Four Noble Truths. You probably won’t hear the Four Noble Truths discussed explicitly in Zen very often, but they are a root teaching from which almost all kinds of Buddhism evolved. You might say that Buddhists have found countless ways of restating the Four Noble Truths over the centuries, changing the language and imagery to suit the audience. The subsequent concepts and texts are so vast and approach the truth from so many different perspectives, it can be difficult to know where to start when introducing them.

In essence, though, almost all Buddhist teachings are pointing toward the same fundamental truths. One of my teachers, Kyogen Carlson, likened the truth to a familiar red fruit, and then admitted, “There are many ways to slice a tomato.” Despite all the wonderful ways Zen has sliced the tomato, when it comes to introducing Zen teachings it seems most straightforward to start with the root of all subsequent Buddhist concepts, the Four Noble Truths.

The Four Noble Truths as presented in this chapter are stated somewhat differently than you often find them translated. They are usually listed as four facts about the world, something like this: life is suffering, suffering is caused by desire, you can be free from suffering if you end desire, and the Buddhist path is how you end desire.

Many scholars have argued over the best translations of this first Buddhist lesson, but most agree that the list as just stated here does a bad job of portraying what the Buddha intended. Instead, it’s more accurate to think of four things that, explored and comprehended, result in liberation, rather than four truisms to be accepted. Here the Four Noble Truths are presented as 1) recognize dukkha; 2) see what causes dukkha; 3) let go of what causes dukkha; 4) practice what supports liberation from dukkha.

DEFINITION

The Four Noble Truths were Shakyamuni Buddha’s first teaching and summarize the essence of Buddhist thought. Translations differ, but they can be expressed like this: 1) recognize the existence of dukkha in your life; 2) learn the causes of that dukkha; 3) let go of the causes of that dukkha; and 4) in all areas of your life, do what supports your ability to take the other three steps. Dukkha is alternatively translated as suffering, stress, dissatisfaction, or unease, and refers to the full spectrum of human unhappiness from acute suffering to a subtle sense of things not being quite right.

One: Recognize Dukkha

The first Noble Truth is “recognize dukkha.” I’m using the term dukkha because it’s impossible to find an English translation of the word that does the term justice. The word is most often translated as suffering, but is a much more complex and subtle experience than that one word can communicate. In fact, the whole next chapter is devoted to further unpacking the many different manifestations of dukkha and how you deal with them. Understanding dukkha is the key to understanding almost all Zen teaching, because it’s the source of your motivation to practice Zen to begin with. Here I will introduce the concept and how it relates to the Noble Truths.

Admitting Life Isn’t Perfect

It can be a bit of a downer to examine how life can be a bummer, and in what ways. It also takes courage and humility. Common sense tells you to keep yourself too busy with enjoyable and rewarding things to think about the uncomfortable or painful aspects of life. If you are forced to deal with those painful aspects, you are supposed to keep yourself busy getting rid of them as soon as possible. When you face difficulties you can’t get rid of, well … you still try to avoid thinking about them as much as possible.

Buddhism suggests a different approach. Instead of avoiding the inevitable pain of life, you face it head on. You examine your feelings and thoughts about difficulty, and prepare yourself to meet it with as much equanimity as possible. There is a traditional Buddhist list of the eight kinds of hardship you are going to have to face at one point or another: birth (the initial discomfort that comes with change), aging, death, pain (emotional and physical), association with what you do not love, separation from what you love, and not getting what you want.

Contrary to popular belief, the Buddha did not teach that life is suffering. He simply observed that people endured these eight kinds of hardships pretty much constantly, to some degree or another, and wondered whether they were doomed to lose their happiness in the face of them.

CONSIDER THIS

Stephen Batchelor describes encountering dukkha in his book Buddhism Without Beliefs:

“No matter how expertly we manage our lives, how convincing an image of well-being we project, we still find ourselves involved with what we hate and torn apart from what we love. We still don’t get what we want and still get what we don’t want. True, we experience joy, success, love, bliss. But in the end we find ourselves once more prone to anguish …. We may know this, but do we understand it? We see it, are even awed by it, but habit impels us to forget it. To cover it over and flee again to the lure of the tantalizing world. For were we to understand it, even in a glimpse, it might change everything.”

When great difficulty seems far off, the question of how you are going to meet it may not seem important. Day-to-day discomfort, while annoying, is often not enough to call your attention to the issue, but the question becomes paramount when you’re the one who is living in the nursing home, or the one who has just lost the dearest person to you in the world. Somehow, you never really think you are going to end up in such situations.

When you’re taken by surprise and suddenly you’re one of the ones facing great difficulty, it may not be easy to work on yourself spiritually with meditation, karma work, or insight. Your time, energy, and attention are likely to be swallowed up by other things (although a kind of natural mindfulness often arises in you when things are really tough). That’s why Buddhists believe it’s worth spending your good times preparing for your bad times. This may seem negative, but that’s not all there is to it.

For one thing, the Buddha pointed out that even when everything is going great, there’s part of you that knows things are eventually going to change and therefore feels ill at ease. This unease can be very subtle, or it can cause significant stress and anxiety. For another thing, the practices recommended for relieving dukkha are the same ones that help you be more aware and appreciative of your life, so your effort doesn’t have to be about the future.

What Dukkha Is

Dukkha usually arises in you when you meet one of the eight human difficulties listed previously. It’s the opposite of what you feel when everything is going splendidly, when all seems right with the world and you are at ease, contented, and comfortable. When faced with difficulty, everything suddenly feels off-kilter. You feel unease and stress. You may be suffering, but that may be overstating the matter. Dukkha is basically just the sense that things aren’t right.

The most important thing to realize about dukkha is that it is not synonymous with painful feelings. You can experience dukkha alongside a whole range of emotions, such as anguish, depression, despair, grief, regret, angst, boredom, disappointment, or a sense of meaninglessness. However, you can also experience the sense that things aren’t right when you are feeling pleasant emotions but you are aware that they won’t last.

Dukkha is usually so tightly entwined with other emotions and experiences that you don’t recognize it as something in and of itself, but it’s the conviction deep down in your being that this is not the way things are supposed to be. This sense can be powerful, such as when you are the victim of injustice. It can also be subtle, such as a pervasive sense that the worthwhile events of your life haven’t happened yet. The less dramatic, existential forms of dukkha may not sound like a big deal, but they are. They can be at the root of someone’s depression or despair, and they may even make life seem not worth living.

When you examine your own experience, you realize dukkha itself causes pain and trouble. It adds a significant layer of stress or suffering to whatever adversity you are experiencing. For example, consider how terrible you would feel if your house burned down. Now consider how much worse you would feel if you had spent lots of time and energy carefully building a fire-resistant house, and then someone deliberately burned it down. In the latter situation you would not only face the hardship of the loss of your house, you would struggle with an overwhelming sense that this should not have happened.

The grief, shock, and worry you naturally feel in response to a challenge like losing a home are not actually a spiritual problem. You can be in a great deal of emotional or physical pain and still feel fundamentally okay. It’s the dukkha that twists you up inside. It’s a pervasive resistance to what is happening that tends to make the pain feel worse and often triggers anger, resentment, depression, and despair. Even when things are going well, the sense that things aren’t quite right gets in the way of your enjoyment of life.

Two: See What Causes Dukkha

The next step, after you have recognized the existence of dukkha in your life, is to learn what causes it. You may think the answer is obvious: life causes dukkha. Human difficulties and their associated emotional and physical pain cause your sense that things aren’t right (because, after all, things aren’t right, right?).

Fortunately, the Buddha didn’t stop there. He was like a scientist searching for a cure to a disease that everyone else thinks is incurable. He observed how people seemed to be entirely at the mercy of their conditions, enjoying fortune when they had it, and miserable when they met with misfortune. One image stuck with him as he contemplated whether this was all life had to offer: a monk he once saw, who was seated calmly in meditation. The monk seemed to have accessed some other way of being that was not so dependent on conditions. This inspired the Buddha to look more deeply at the issue of suffering.

ZEN WISDOM

“If people do not meet with sadness or suffering, they will never seek for the true way of life. When they are driven into a tight corner where they can move neither forward nor backward, then they finally begin to reflect on themselves, harbor doubts about their lives, and ask themselves the question: What is the true way to live?”

—Shundo Aoyama Roshi, from Zen Seeds: Reflections of a Female Zen Priest

Desire Versus Grasping

The Buddha realized it was grasping and aversion that cause dukkha. It isn’t desire that causes dukkha, as some translations of Buddhist teachings suggest. It’s perfectly natural, and probably unavoidable, to have a preference that things go well. You don’t like pain and difficulty, while there are many pleasant and rewarding things you like. There’s a big difference, however, between an objective acknowledgment of your desire, and giving your preference the status of an imperative and subsequently grasping after it.

For example, you can desire to get to work on time as opposed to getting stuck in traffic. You cause problems when “I hope I get to work on time” becomes “I have to get to work on time, or else!” Then you stew in impotent rage as you creep along slowly in a long line of cars. The first of these statements is recognizing a desire you have, while the second is grasping after that desire.

When you grasp, it’s like you lean off your spiritual center to reach for something. The opposite of grasping is aversion, or leaning away from something you don’t want, but it’s really the same activity. Either way, when you lean you give up your equanimity and move away from the upright, dignified, ready posture that is Zen practice.

Grasping Doesn’t Help

Despite all appearances to the contrary, grasping and aversion don’t bring you lasting satisfaction and happiness. In situations where you are able to act in order to bring the world more into line with your preferences, you generally do so anticipating greater reward and comfort. If you are successful in your efforts, you may feel gratified, and dukkha may seem like an adaptive experience that impels you to make the world a better place. Grasping and aversion may seem like useful human endeavors.

Unfortunately, you never reach satisfaction for long using this method because things are constantly changing. Just when you’ve gotten everything the way you like it, something else needs to be dealt with. Alternatively, if you are not successful in your efforts to bring the world more into line with your preferences, you have a real problem. You are stuck with dukkha, and all of your grasping or aversion is useless. This can cause real suffering.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Beware of thinking that Zen requires you to get rid of your desires. Not only is it extremely difficult to do so, it may require you to deny or suppress your needs, or turn away from ways you can benefit the world. The goal is to change the way you relate to your desires. When you see them as potential options rather than imperatives, you’re able to act on them with more wisdom and compassion.

If grasping and aversion were the only ways to make changes in the world, of course, you’d have to use them in order to live a full human life. The amazing thing is they are completely unnecessary. It’s possible to take effective action without giving up your spiritual center, by simply being present and responding with as much wisdom and compassion as you can muster.

To go back to our traffic example, you do not have to be simmering with impatience (grasping) in order to take the next exit off the freeway and find a better route to work. Calmly recognizing your preference to get to work on time, you avoid the traffic. Not grasping does not in any way entail passivity or stupidity, it just means doing without the extra “Noooooo!” in response to the way things are.

Three: Let Go of What Causes Dukkha

How do you let go of what causes dukkha, the troubling sense that this is not the way things should be? Dukkha arises when you let your simple desire turn into an imperative, leading to grasping and aversion. How, then, do you avoid allowing this process to unfold? It can be extremely difficult to convince yourself that what you are feeling is a “simple desire,” not an absolute requirement.

In our traffic example, you do have to get to work on time, or else, right? If you’re late you’ll face all kinds of additional difficulties, and maybe even lose your job! At some level you know that your impatience in the midst of traffic is useless and probably even counterproductive, but it may still prove impossible to let it go. Even if you’ve got a certain philosophy about traffic that allows you to keep your cool when dealing with it, there’s going to be another kind of situation in your life where it’s not so easy.

This brings us to what is arguably the most radical discovery of the Buddha: it is possible to just let go of grasping and aversion. This “just” is not about the process being easy, it’s about the fact that ultimately the process is incredibly simple.

You might think that to let go of grasping and aversion you need to adopt a whole new philosophy, or argue yourself into no longer chasing after your desires, or go through a lengthy process of behavioral reconditioning. After all, the impulse to get what you want (or avoid what you don’t want) is so powerful! In the end, however, it’s more like you search and search until you finally find the “off switch” in your own mind, so one moment you can be grasping and filled with dukkha, and the next moment you can be calm and relieved.

CONSIDER THIS

In his book Wings to Awakening, Ajahn Thanissaro describes the process that the Buddha went through when he discovered how to attain the cessation of dukkha. Thanissaro calls the Buddha’s process “this/that conditionality,” which means that the Buddha employed a method of observing his own mind. This method can be applied to anything you experience. It involves noticing that when this is present, that is present; when this arises, that arises; when this is not present, that is not present; when this is ended, that is ended. It’s like using the scientific method on your subjective experience in order to discover causal connections.

To cultivate the ability to just let go, you use the tools of meditation and mindfulness to carefully observe your own mind. It can take a long time to be able to concentrate well enough to watch your mind as it goes through the whole process of generating dukkha. A desire arises, the desire is interpreted as an imperative, grasping ensues, all your effort gets focused on changing things according to your preference, and dukkha is born.

As described in Chapter 7, after observing this process over and over, more space appears between the steps. Eventually you have room to make a conscious choice between one step and another, rather than all of it occurring on autopilot. Then one day you try something different. Instead of jumping from desire to imperative, you ask yourself, “What if I just left it there?”

Now the chain of cause and effect is broken, and you don’t end up grasping or experiencing the resulting stress, dissatisfaction, or suffering. You’ve found the “off switch” for dukkha. It’s not always easy to find the switch or to make yourself use it (resistance to letting go is discussed in Chapter 11), but after you’ve consciously turned it off even once, things are never the same.

Four: Practice What Supports Liberation

Another radical aspect of Buddhist teaching is that it doesn’t just tell you what you need to do, it tells you how to do it. Given the first three Noble Truths you can recognize dukkha and its cause, and try to let go of the cause, but there is a very compelling reason not to let go of the cause of dukkha: self-interest. The subject of the fourth Noble Truth is the question of how to transcend your self-interest and learn to let go of grasping and aversion. The fourth truth is the path of practice. In ancient Buddhism this was called the Noble Eightfold Path, and consisted of two types of practices: those dealing with ethical behavior, and those dealing with the cultivation of insight.

DEFINITION

The Noble Eightfold Path is the fourth Noble Truth, and it outlines the essential components of Buddhist practice: right speech, right action, right livelihood, right concentration, right mindfulness, right effort, right view, and right intention.

The ethical aspects of the Eightfold Path are right speech, right action, and right livelihood, each of which overlap with the various Zen precepts discussed in Chapter 6. Each aspect of the Eightfold Path begins with the word “right,” but this is not meant to imply a narrow, prescribed course of action that results in moral superiority. In this case “right” means true, genuine, suitable or appropriate.

In a Buddhist context, something you did or said would not be right if it involved indulging self-interest at the expense of another, or any of the obvious harmful actions like killing or stealing. The basic idea is that, unless you live your life in a healthy way that minimizes harm, you will be unable to let go of grasping and aversion. Instead, you will be strengthening your habits based in self-interest and making a mess of your life, and therefore will be unable to liberate yourself from dukkha.

The remaining aspects of the Eightfold Path are devoted to the cultivation of the insight that’s necessary for fully transcending your self-interest. Three of the practices are about developing concentration, or the ability to perceive reality clearly. These are right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Concentration (in meditation) and mindfulness have already been discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Right effort can be compared to the karma work discussed in Chapter 7, which is long-term and careful work to change habits so they are wholesome instead of harmful. Right effort refers particularly to habits of mind (habits of body and speech would be covered under right action and right speech).

Two of the Eightfold practices specifically address the cultivation of insight that leads to transcending self-interest. The first of these is right view, which amounts to a deep, firsthand knowledge of the way things really are. This is often phrased in terms of understanding the Buddhist teachings, including the law of karma and the Four Noble Truths. However, these teachings are there to be tested, so when you work on right view you are essentially trying to see reality, which at some point you may recognize is described accurately by Buddhist teachings.

The second insight-related aspect of the Eightfold Path is right intention, which is essentially transcendence of your self-interest. When you have mastered right intention, selfishness and immorality do not occur to you, because—through right view—you have come to understand that the true nature of your being is empty of any inherent, enduring self-nature (more on this in the next chapter).

Most types of Buddhism, including Zen, can be seen as unique elaborations on this fourth Noble Truth, the path of practice. Each kind of Buddhism has developed teachings and methods that address the how of practice—how you transcend self-interest and let go of grasping and aversion—that are well-suited to particular cultures, times, and types of people.

For example, the founders of Pure Land Buddhism believed that encouraging people to seek enlightenment actually just stimulated self-interest, so they advocated the cultivation of a deep devotion and self-surrender to Amida Buddha. In Nichiren Buddhism, the Lotus Sutra is viewed as being the pinnacle of Buddhist teaching, so effective that wholehearted focus on the recitation of a verse that pays homage to it is sufficient practice (namu myoho renge kyo). Zen advocates meditation and a personal experience of what the Buddha himself realized, arguing that this stays true to the original Buddhist practices and teachings.

The Least You Need to Know